Ussins

This morning we drove to a local elementary school to vote for our congressional district. (I voted for this guy - guess why? - I only know enough about him to know I don’t dislike him though).

Mago had been very unhappy deciding whether to come along and ultimately did. (It was very brief - most of the times I’ve gone to the polls nearly everyone there is from my neighborhood. You’d think my neighborhood has the only voting citizens in Utah.) I’d spent the morning doing other things and realized Mago needs some time with me, so I invited him to drive home with me and took him for a drive to see “where mommy used to go to school”. Showing him some of the BYU campus I remembered a site where Tia and I spent time and took him there, an area of apartments off campus.

I took him to a particular corner in residential Provo, explaining to him where I’d go:

Me: I’m going to show you what mom and I called the Magic Tree.

Mago: Does the magic tree disappear?

Me: No, we called it the Magic Tree because we fell in love under it, and love is magic.

After a bit of searching I spotted the corner to realize the large tree wasn’t there any more. All that was left was a dark patch of ground without much grass. I explained this to Mago:

Me: Oh - the tree isn’t there any more. Do you see that dark spot in the grass? That’s what’s left of the tree. They must have torn it down.

Mago: The Magic Tree did disappear.

Mago (a few moments later) … Did Jesus bring it back to life?

At the city carnival just over a week ago, I took Nem-nem on a ferris wheel and held her tight.

I didn’t know it was going to go around fast. She was terrified for her life, screaming, sobbing, squirming, and inconsolable. I felt terrible. I’d have never taken Mago on a ferris wheel when he was an infant - I was too protective. Maybe I’ve swung too far the other way.

(Although usually I’m.. very protective.)

Driving home from dinner at my dad’s this past Sunday (Father’s Day), I played favorites in the CD player that lulled Nemmy off to sleep. One of them was Time After Time as it appears on the album for STRICTLY BALLROOM (probably Tia’s favorite film - or she showed it to everyone in High School). I reached back and held Mago’s hand and sang to him in between treacherously brief glances back to the road (I can’t believe that either considering the last paragraph I wrote) and he lovingly smiled back at me. In a while he asked:

Daddy, does this song teach you to pick me up if I fall down?

That night around 10, about an hour and a half after I finally got him in bed (Tia was off late in another city taking someone’s family photograph), he came to the bathroom as I cleaned out his toilet. He held up a folded paper card he’d colored - I guess from Nursery at church - and said:

Daddy, I forgot to give this to you. This is yours.

It was a line drawing of a father holding up his kid, a boy about Mago’s size/age, the card colored with blue marker scribbles solidly clumped together roughly inside every shape. Inside was a note scrawled with a nursery worker’s help:

Daddy I love you too.

A simple thing like that from any little kid cuts any parent down into a burbling lump much smaller than the kid.

The other day I was holding Nem-nem and making her “jump” on a bed with Mago, and other general riotous fun, including making silly babbling monster sounds for her and chasing Mago around the room, all of which she laughed uproariously at and squealed and giggled. Then Mago said:

Let’s play Sambo-Wan.
Okay, how do you play that?
You go like this.

He stood, bending down to touch his foot with one arm, thrusting the other arm up in the air behind him, making a fist. Another way to play Sambo-Wan apparently is to “Do tricks and stuff”, including jumping off a bed and getting as many little kicks as you can in, midair and crouching before you land.

Photograph by Tia.

Nem-nem is really coming alive with babble. Also starting English (if her babble isn’t strictly English) words beyond “Ma-ma” and “Da-da”. When she sees a duck she’s sometimes said, several times in a row, “duck” with a kind of guttural scraping - German? - g sound, and signs “bird” as she says it. She also says “bird” (”bii”) and, starting yesterday at the pet store, “dog”, which she repeated later when shown pictures of dogs.

The other night Mago came from his bed a while after bed time and said to Tia:

Mom, I have a very important job to do. I have to feed you, and dad, and Nem-nem, and me.

And headed for upstairs, Tia then learned from him, to get cookies.

Mago sometimes talks in his sleep. It can be quite funny when he mumbles indecipherable things with great meaning (the babyhood exhibited in Nem-nem so well has never and will never escape him, I hope.) Last night he came and slept on a mattress in our room because Nem-nem was keeping him up. This morning he was stirring in his sleep and said

Mommy, I need..

She rushed to him and put the blanket back over him:

A blanket?

He went back into deeper sleep. Maybe fifteen minutes later when I was up, I put the blanket back on him again and put Dermitt (his plush dog toy named after a character in P.B. Bear) back in his arms, and I suppose he finished his sentence, whispering importantly, with a kind of awe:

.. treasure.

I took these pictures yesterday, the last of which is Mago with his “aquarium”.

Last Friday I was working in the yard for maybe 4 hours, and finally came in and Mago had put on Clifford’s puppy days DVD all by himself. I rested in bed and when Clifford put painted paw marks all over his owner’s shirt, ‘painting’ her shirt giving her a great idea for her friend’s birthday party, Mago giggled delightedly. I then told him we could go buy shirts to paint. We’ve done that, and he painted with sparkly paint on a green shirt, using stencils: a crab, a seahorse, a fish, and waves and smears.

Alex’s addition: A week or so ago in church Tia showed crayon drawing to Nem-nem, with a large red crayon. I think that was Nem-nem’s first seeing crayon coloring? As she watched the crayon leave the first broad marks on a page, she smiled.

Yesterday Nem-nem stood on her own and balanced for a moment, according to Tia.

Mago’s snail died. Tia had taken him from the small trees on the north of the house, for Mago. We didn’t know how to feed him properly, I think - we put leaves and grass and water in the cage with him, but he eventually dried up and curled up inside his shell, and the lines on his shell and the snail himself turned sickly orange. Tia took the snail out and set it in a garden to see if it would move - nope. When she told Mago his snail was dead, he started to cry and animatedly talk about his pet scary kitty that ate the snail, and that he needs to go to the pet store to get a scary kitty, and I don’t remember what other things that don’t seem to me to connect up, but I know they make some sense to him I don’t understand. I asked him if he was sad his snail died and he said yes.

But he insists this scary kitty is real - and seems to think the scary kitty is responsible for the death of the snail. Maybe I’d want to think that too if deep inside I knew my parents didn’t give enough of a care about the snail to learn how to care for it themselves and teach me

(Which is something I’ve apologized to Mago about.)

I buried it in the front garden, and Mago has wanted to dig it up. Any time you bring up the snail he interjects the scary kitty. I’ve tried to persuade him to have a proper funeral for the snail, but he won’t have any of that.

Tia sent me this IM on behalf of Mago:

Yesterday morning Nem-nem spotted a fat robin on the front lawn and pointed to it. (Tia notices birds too. We’ll be driving on the freeway and she’ll tell me there was a hawk or some other bird of prey - and it’s past too soon and I don’t see it.) I pointed to the bird also, said “Bird” and signed it to her, by moving my fingers like a bird’s beak. (I forgot the beak goes on your chin when you sign this.) Nem-nem tried to say the word:

Abd. AAbd. Aadb.

- and imitated the sign. A while later from downstairs she ventured upstairs (I stayed behind her to keep her safe) and to the front door, to go back outside. I picked her up and we waited in the front yard. She signed bird - she wants to see it again. In a long while the bird emerged from the bushes again, hunting for worms. “Aabd, aabd” she repeated and signed. We watched it listen to the ground and then peck - finally it tugged a really big worm with a lot of tugs out of the ground and chewed it apart in pecks until swallowing it whole and flying off to prevent an arriving bluejay from stealing it.

I hope those last grisly details really helped you appreciate this whole entry more.

Tia reports that Nem-nem picked a tissue up the other day, held it to her face and blew several times - just blowing, not any effective nose-blowing - just imitating.